Here's more stuff I read about during my creative retreat, this time from a book called Double Your Creative Power! by S L Stebel. Stebel has some interesting ideas about stimulating creative ideas - kind of like an extended version of Julia Cameron's morning pages. He also suggests doing a 'step outline'.

A step outline is where you scan your whole manuscript and write a sentence for every occasion where something actually happens. It can include dialogue, etc. but it has to be something that either ()a) advances the story, (b)defines a character or (c)creates atmosphere.

I haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to when editing my novel. Seems like an interesting way of checking you haven't got loads of unnecessary passages and that you're not boring the arse off the reader.

Cath

Sounds good. I've heard of it before in screenplay writing (but too lazy to actually do one!)

Elspeth

I know what you mean about being too lazy - I don't feel very inclined to do one, but feel it could be a good idea!

Cath

I can imagine it would help with novel writing- I always do one when attacking the next draft of a screenplay cos it helps to focus where the story is going, who the focus is on in terms of characters- in fact it just made me realise that a screenplay I thought was about one person, was actually about another. It can feel like an anti-creative thing to do at first, but in a way, it's satisfyingly practical. What have you got to lose?

Interesting. Sounds as if, ideally, you'd end up with a novel constructed entirely from those sentences. Shouldn't every word in a novel be doing one of those things?

Emma

A word of warning. This sounds similar to something I had to do with a partially completed novel for a course recently. When I'd finished, although it was valuable in the sense that it highlighted a few imbalances in the novel, I felt as if I'd completely deconstructed the story. It was like taking all the threads from a tapestry, laying them out in a row, and wondering why it didn’t look so pretty any more.

Hopefully I’ll feel differently about it eventually but, for the moment, I feel as if I've destroyed it.

Dee

How can one double something that cannot be measured in the first place?

There seems to be quite a lot of differing advice of this sort but I find myself aligning with Dee, and I love her tapestry threads simile, and EmmaD with her comment that hits the nail on the head; every word should be essential and play a part.

Len

Dee,

You should remember that tapestry simile and use it somewhere. It is great!

Brian.

Len and Brian,

Thank you!

xx

This may not belong in this thread but Dee's great simile has got me thinking. Any ideas on how to come up with great similes? To me, whne you come accross a really good one they make a piece memorable. Poor one's really detract from a piece, give the feeling the author is trying too hard. Any thoughts on how to develop the art of comming up with great ones?

Brian

My all-time favourite – and, sadly, I don’t know the name of the author – describing two female waiters in a dining room:

As gaunt and bitter as a pair of vinegar bottles.

God, I wish I'd written that!

Dee

That's my point, you don't remember the author but you remember the great simile. So how do we get better at it?

Don't want to hijack this thread so I have started another.

Thanks,

Brian.

I have just done something similar with my first novel. One or two sentences detailing each chapter and also number of book pages, it was not until I had completed this that I realised two chapters were completely unnecessary and another two were too long. I edited over 40 pages out of my book, which is now being seriously considered by one of the more famous literary agents in the UK.

Sitting waiting on the phone call!!

The other way of doing it is to be really rigorous and hard nosed when you're planning and plotting your story/novel/script. Then write exactly what you've planned.

Even then it sounds like it might be a useful exercise - a kind of back-check. Tho' I've never tried it myself.

Sometimes it hurts to take things out but you have to accept they're not doing anything and the piece works as well or better without them. If that's the case, they gotta go.

I plan out my novels on a big chart, one column for each narrative thread (and sometimes one for the development of the big, shaping philosophical theme that no-one will ever get except me). One row for each chapter, to make sure I get the right bits of the different narratives alongside each other. Probably 5-15 words in each box in pencil, of the incidents and/or changes in the narrator, which I biro in when I've written it. Often of course the biro version has changed a lot from the pencil. If a real change of plot comes along, or one narrative needs re-spacing up against another, I can rub out the future and re-pencil it to take account.

I suppose you could call that a step outline, except in not being sentences?

Sounds an interesting book - pity about the title, makes it sound like a weightlifter's manual

Emma

<Added>

It's also quite handy when it comes to revisions, to remind me which chapter an incident is in, and have a check to remind me when I'm changing it, what it links to of the other narratives. I'd pin the chart on the wall if I wasn't shy of people knowing about my work while I'm working on it. And I write the wordcount beside each finished chapter, to cheer me on, and to give me a crude sense of the pacing of it all, which is particularly hard to tell when you're writing the first draft in notebooks full of crossings out and big sprawly handwriting.

Emma